The purpose of this study was to investigate preservice middle school
mathematics teachers’ (PMT) beliefs about the nature of mathematics in
metaphor tasks when they are designed and analyzed in different ways and
their beliefs about mathematics teacher. Nine PMTs attending the
practice teaching course completed four metaphor tasks (two open-ended,
two structured) about mathematics, mathematics teacher, mathematics
teaching and learning through the semester. The metaphors they produced
were analyzed both by the revised version (Löfström et al., 2010) of the
identity framework by Beijard et al. (2000) and with an inductive
analysis. Findings suggested that employing open-ended task structure
and inductive analysis might provide more information about PMTs’
beliefs about the nature of mathematics even in metaphors that are not
constructed for mathematics.